The issue of the Judenräte in the Ghettos and organizations such as the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland (Reich Association of the Jews in Germany) is a bit more complicated and the motives behind their actions a bit more varied that your summed up reading of Arendt suggests.

One of the most nefarious characteristics of how the Nazis operated is that they forced their victims into certain kinds of complicity in the crimes perpetrated against them. The Jewish councils or "Judenräte" are the perfect example of that. The Jewish councils were established in Ghettos by the Nazis and functioned function like a municipal administration. When the Nazis established the Ghettos, out of a variety of reasons but foremost to minimize the contacts between Germans and Jews and because of the ease of their own bureaucracy, they put a Jewish administration in charge of running the Ghettos from the inside. The members of the Jewish councils were imprisoned in the Ghettos like anyone else but they were charged with making sure operations were running, i.e. food was given out, the police force patrolling the streets, that everybody showed up for work, the water was running etc. For this purpose they became the primary spokespeople of the Ghetto inhabitants vis a vis the Nazi administration.

They were also forced to implement Nazi policy within the Ghetto. Mostly, this came down to compiling the lists for deportations to the camps, i.e. deciding who was to be deported and who was to remain in the Ghetto. This, of course, makes the whole history of the Jewish councils a rather delicate and sensitive subject. This basic approach had been pioneered by the Nazis in Germany where the Jewish administration was forced to basically assist in their own discrimination and the theft of Jewish property. When the first Ghettos were institutionalized by the Nazi occupation in the General Government, this model of administration was taken over.

Members of these Jewish councils found themselves in very difficult moral situations that for us as people who have not experienced them first hand are incredibly difficult to asses. They knew that when Nazi officials requested lists of who was to be deported, this meant that people were sent to their deaths in many a case. At the same time, a refusal to cooperate could mean the entire Ghetto was killed outright. Rather than the wish to protect themselves or fellow officials within the Jewish administration, one of the prime motives of basically all the Jewish councils was to try to save as many people in their Ghetto as was possible.

Put by the Nazis in a position that presented itself as "give up some of your people, so you can save many more of your people" is an impossible situation in terms of what choice to make. And of course responses to this varied: Some were killed for their refusal to cooperate such as Joseph Parnes in Lvov. He refused to hand over Jews for deportation to the Janowska forced-labor camp and was killed by the Nazis for his refusal. Others committed suicide like the head of the Jewish council in Warsaw, Adam Czerniakow, who ended his life because the Nazis ordered him to hand over orphans in the Ghetto for deportation. Others like Elchanan Elkes in Kovno assisted in the resistance and organized an uprising (an option that was only open to him because there were Soviet Partisans operating near Kovno and that many others chose too where it was an option). And again, others believed that the inhabitants of their Ghetto could be saved by making them economically indispensable. Chaim Rumkowski in Lodz worked very hard to get the Wehrmacht to use the Jews from the Ghetto as cheap labor because he believed that would save them from deportation; a strategy that ultimately failed.

Especially figures like Rumkowski have been heavily criticized (to the point where one was shot in Israel after the war) because of what ex post has been seen as a policy of collaboration. And yet, the difficulty of this position lies in that we know now how the whole thing ended and developed, a kind of knowledge they were not privy to. Put by the Nazis into a position of basically being made complicit in the murder of their own people, these very different responses often stem from the utter helplessness of the situation and experience of these men. And when discussing the Jewish councils, this always needs to be taken into account lest we don't morally condemn people who have been put in an incredibly difficult situation by a bunch of genocidal murderers.

In virtually all cases, whether it was the Reichsvereinigung in Germany, which started out as an administrative tool in assisting the forced emigration program in Germany or whether it was the Judenräte in the Ghettos, the prime motive of people in charge was a policy intended to save people – and that means a whole lot of people, not just their own members and officials – from discrimination, deportation or death. That in many a case, they were not very successful with their strategies is, however, due to the insidious politics of the Germans. They couldn't know how it ended in most cases that are known clung to the hope of enabling survival as well as the unbelief that it was actually a possibility for the Nazis to kill every last one of them. And constructing an ex-post argument that is brought against them because we know how the story ends is, imo, a very difficult position to take.

Nonetheless, it is one that Arendt essentially took and that was rather controversial, more so back in the 1960s when Jewish communities world-wide were to a large part comprised of people who had survived some form of Nazi rule and thus had understandably strong feelings about the Judenräte and Jewish organizations but even today, the subject is a rather sensitive one in Israel and beyond.

Arendt was much criticized for her assessment, not at least because people asserted it was easy for her judging harshly since she had fled Germany early on and had never been confronted first-hand with the difficult moral choices presented to those who hadn't been as lucky as her. But historians also leveled critique against her at the time. Raul Hilberg, seminal Holocaust scholar and author of The Destruction of the European Jews heavily emphasized that the Jewish Councils were not just tools of the Germans but also a tool of the Jewish community and whose policies often enabled people who'd otherwise been killed to survive.

Arendt in her reverence for Jewish resistance fighters on the one hand and her harsh judgement not just for the Judenräte but the Jewish community as a whole – asserting they were "like lambs letting themselves being lead to the slaughter" – is a judgement based on the fundamental ignorance of historical circumstances and context. Organized, large-scale, and even small-scale, resistance against a sate and its policies requires, as demonstrated by numerous national resistance movements in WWII, both an extensive infrastructure as well as a certain good-will from the surrounding populations. Both were things very hard to come by for Jews in many an area of Europe. Being a minority that had either integrated into society, like it was the case in Western Europe, or had been shunned and forced together like in Eastern Europe, such things like a cadre organization akin to those of communist parties or former military officers, which were the two most common resistance models in WWII occupied countries, were absent in their community. Similarly, unlike a movement for national liberation like the AK in Poland or the Partisans in Yugoslavia, Jews were often regraded with suspicion or even anti-Semitism in many countries, thus even making it difficult to integrate into an existing resistance movement.

Similarly, Arendt's assessment also does not really take into account of what kind of a step, armed insurrection and resistance represents and that for many a people back then, the idea of this defies pretty much every social value they have been taught (as it does today, at least in some cultures).

In the end, Arendt's harsh assessment of the Jewish Councils and Jewish organizations is one not shared by many historians of the issues since when regarded in their historical context, it becomes very clear that the Jewish councils and Jewish organizations were put in an impossible situation by the Germans and historical assessment of their acts represents great difficulty as well as a lot of historical care – both things Arendt did not exactly display in her text.

Sources:

• Dan Michman: 'Jewish "Headships" under Nazi Rule: The Evolution and Implementation of an Administrative Concept', in: Dan Michman: Holocaust Historiography, a Jewish Perspective. Conceptualizations, Terminology, Approaches and Fundamental Issues, London, 2003, pp. 159–175.

• Dan Michmann: 'On the Historical Interpretation of the Judenräte Issue: Between Intentionalism, Functionalism and the Integrationist Approach of the 1990s', in: Moshe Zimmermann (ed.), On Germans and Jews under the Nazi Regime. Essays by Three Generations of Historians. A Festschrift in Honor of Otto Dov Kulka (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2006), pp. 385–397.

• Aharon Weiss: Jewish Leadership in Occupied Poland. Postures and Attitudes. In: Yad Vashem Studies. 12, 1977, S. 335–365.

• Revital Ludewig-Kedmi: Opfer und Täter zugleich? Moraldilemmata jüdischer Funktionshäftlinge in der Shoah, Gießen 2001.